A. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to artificial intelligence applications that require training sets having positive and negative examples, especially recommender systems and particularly for use with television. The invention relates even more particularly to such applications that use statistically valid techniques for choosing negative examples for training sets.
B. Related Art
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/498,271 filed Feb. 4, 2000 (US 000018), incorporated herein by reference, discloses a television recommender system. In that system, recommendations are deduced based on a pattern of shows watched or not watched. Of course, the number of shows not watched necessarily dwarfs the number of shows watched. Accordingly, a heuristic was developed for selecting shows not watched. The heuristic was to select a not watched show for each watched show, the not watched show being taken at random from time slots other than the slot in which the corresponding watched show occurred.
In general, many artificial intelligence applications have training sets with positive and negative examples. The heuristic for selecting negative examples needs improvement over the concept of selecting negative examples at random one-by-one with reference to respective individual positive examples.